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Books, Madness, Books, Madness...Did I mention books?

vrijdag 21 februari 2014

I'm interviewing author William J. Benning, author of space opera series "First Admiral", which already has four books in the series.

1)What is your favourite part of
the process of writing a book?

What I enjoy
about the process of writing a book is the character development and creating
something from scratch.Generally, I
have a broad outline of how my character is likely to behave or react to
situations.However, I don’t really
flesh out my characters until they are in the situations that I create for them.My characters tend to evolve as I write them.And, like most writers it sometimes gives me problems
with consistency in later stories.The
great thing about this style is that I can really indulge in character
development.Future adventures of my
lead character; Billy Caudwell, will see him under some fairly intense
emotional stress – making him a much darker, edgy, more unpredictable, volatile
and dangerous character than he has been previously – and, marking a ‘rite of
passage’ from the last vestiges of his boyhood naivety into young adulthood.

2)Tell us more about your main
character. What would his dream holiday destination be? Which celebrity would
he love to meet in real life?

Billy Caudwell,
my lead character, is (now) a 15 year old student having been packed off to a
private schoolboy his mother.Billy’s
mother and father are estranged and separated with a view to divorcing.Billy, very much a self-reliant individual,
continues to expand the Universal Alliance whilst keeping his First Admiral
identity a secret.I have described
Billy Caudwell as about 5’ 7”, stocky build with red hair and an impressive
crop of freckles and acne.At school he
tended to favour the humanities subjects like history, politics, economics as
opposed to sciences and languages.

Billy’s ideal
holiday destination?That would need to
be somewhere historical with a military slant – probably a battlefield tour.

Which celebrity
would he like to meet?In one of the
early drafts of “First Admiral” Billy was taken by his father to see (the now
late and lamented) Neil Armstrong as he was driven through their home town.Billy was inspired by simply a brief glance
at the first man to set foot on the moon.

3)What are some of the challenges
your main character faces?

Billy Caudwell
is very much in the vein of the hero-with-a-secret-identity.He has the tough job of being a 15 year old
human.Billy is not the most handsome of
guys and tends to struggle with self-confidence to the extent that in the early
books of the series he was bullied at school.Self-doubt in his personal life is something that haunts Billy Caudwell,
however, in his military endeavours he has the Mind Profile of a now-dead alien
military genius to fall back upon.The
Mind Profile can, at times, conflict with his own quite naïve sense of values
creating problems for Billy.

He has a sharp
mind and a strong streak of idealism that often presents him with difficult
‘moral’ decisions as a Supreme Military Commander.He is very prone to guilt after having sent
people to their deaths in military actions.He has a habit of tending to err on the side of ‘compassion’ in his
decision making, which, although the right thing at individual levels, is often
detrimental at a ‘bigger picture’ level.

Billy is
desperately trying to keep his First Admiral identity secret fearing that earth
governments will attempt to coerce him into surrendering his advanced alien
technology by threatening his family.Plus, he is becoming more and more aware that the Universal Alliance
will expand to the point where he can no longer juggle the two parts of his
life.He knows that a decision will have
to be made to leave Earth, but he just keeps on putting the decision off.

4)Is there a villain in your
book? What is the villain's reasons for struggling against the protagonist?

I have a
tendency not to create 1950’s type villains with black hats, masks and a nifty
line in ‘mwuh-ha-ha-ha-ha’ laughter.Real life is a bit more complicated than ‘Good vs Evil’ although
(ultimately) choices are forced upon people which very often casts them in such
roles.The ‘antagonists’ that I create
are very often people in difficult situations who have to make hard choices
that conflict with those of my main character.

In the
forthcoming Billy Caudwell adventure, the ‘villains’ are a nomadic species who
are in decline in a military and cultural sense.After centuries of roaming the galaxy;
dominating and exploiting less warlike species, their way of life is rapidly
decaying.The species is having
difficulty feeding all of its people, creating fears of societal breakdown and
civil war.There has been no incentive
for the species to change their ways, develop their technology or allow their
rigidly defined society to evolve.

With Billy
Caudwell’s expanding Universal Alliance squaring up to the Bardomil Empire,
they are caught in the middle with their resources starting to dwindle and more
and more of the ‘weaker’ species that they previously dominated now fighting
back.

With Earth
firmly planted in the de-militarized zone between the two power blocs, the
Bardomil offer the once-powerful nomadic species as much clandestine military
and financial aid needed to conquer and colonize the planet.This brings Billy Caudwell into a conflict of
interest where he must decide whether to honour the Universal Alliance’s treaty
obligations or defend his home planet, his family and everything that he loves.

5)What projects are you working
on at the moment?

At the moment I
am working on two novels and two short stories. The next Billy Caudwell
adventure is in production.In the next
adventure, Billy is still trying to juggle his double life as the First Admiral
and Supreme Military Commander of the rapidly expanding Universal Alliance and
as a 15 year old student on planet earth.This time, Billy is under suspicion from a (UK) Special Branch officer
who was originally sent to make background checks on Billy’s father.Billy’s father; having secretly been
implanted with the Mind Profile of an alien armaments inventor/industrialist,
has gone from being a humble factory worker to a multi-millionaire inventor of
consumer-electronics in a very short space of time.He is now building an ‘Observatory’ in the
Nevada Desert (as a cover for an advanced planetary defence weapon) which has
drawn the attention of the US military.

Billy’s sudden
new-found expertise in mathematics, physics and sciences (at which he never
excelled previously) also makes the Special Branch officer very
suspicious.Meanwhile, an alien species
are developing and secretly manufacturing a bacteriological weapon on earth to
weaken humanity’s resistance prior to a military invasion of the planet.Billy has to combat this threat to the planet
whilst maintaining his own secret identity.

I’m also in the
process of writing up the first title in a new series about a time-travelling
artefact hunter with a YA female lead.

In the short
stories, I have written a sequel to the highly-successful ‘Private Gimble’ about an ex-poacher turned sniper hunter in the
trenches of the Western Front.This
time, Gimble has the mission to retrieve a messenger caught in No Man’s Land and
pursued by a German patrol.

The second short
story also has a World War One theme.This time, the ghost of a young soldier; killed in action, and the last
remaining spirit in the cemetery (the others having had their graves visited by
a relative or loved one and having passed on to the Afterlife) is visited by
his - now very elderly – sweetheart.In
an emotional encounter, both of them find some form of closure (and
redemption).

Thanks for the interview!

Author Bio

The author, William
J.Benning was born in Dumfries (south west Scotland) in 1963. With his 50th
birthday fast approaching, Benning has decided to grow old disgracefully. An
intensely private individual, Benning recently returned to his home town
seeking inspiration for his passion of creative writing. At age 18,
Benning left home to take an Honours Degree in Psychology at Strathclyde
University in Glasgow. He has some very fond memories, and many nights of vague
recollection - which are, on the whole, probably best forgotten (!) - from his
student days. After graduating, Benning had a career "false
start" moving into the world of Pest Control Management. However, after
several unhappy years, he switched tack and took further qualifications in
Personnel Management, carving out a successful and enjoyable career in Human
Resources as well as Learning & Development. Throughout his career,
Benning has worked to support the activities of the British Red Cross.

From his early days as a First Aid Volunteer, he enjoyed working for the
organisation which gave him further skills and built his self-confidence.
Progressing within British Red Cross, Benning became a First Aid Instructor
(Trainer), Assessor and Lecturer plus becoming invoved in training other
Trainers and Assessors. Having returned to Dumfries to further his writing
career, Benning now lives alone, but has been adopted by four members of the
Canine Community. With four dogs in his life - and a newly arrived litter of
Tibetan Terrier pups - plus a newly published novel, life is never going to be
dull for Benning. William likes his sci-fi, but is also keen on military
history and speculative fiction. Among his fiction favourites are Harry
Turtledove, the late George MacDonald Fraser, Bernard Cornwell and Clive
Cussler. William collects Edinburgh Crystal and has a terrible weakness for
malt whisky. He has published his novel First Admiral with Malachite Quills in 2012.